New build, questions and queries.

[light875]

First of all, hello to all. My first visit to these forums and my hopes of some great help are high.

I've been considering building a new gaming machine for a while now and am just about in the right place money wise to start it off, well at least to start building it on paper.

This is what i've come up with so far.

Antec Nine Hundred/Ultimate Gamer Case no PSU - £68.25 Corsair Memory 650W TX SERIES ATX - £65.78 XFX GeForce 8800GT XT Ed 512MB DDR3 PCIE Dual DVI TV - £103.56 Corsair Memory 4GBKIT (2X2GB) 800MHZ NON ECC CL5 - £53.66 Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz 6MB Cache S775 1333MHZ - £124.71 XFX S775 nForce 680i LT SLI DDR2 ATX - £62.45 Samsung Spinpoint 500GB 7200RPM 16MB SATA300 - £42.05 Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit OEM - £68.22 Total (inc VAT) - £588.68

Now, i've shown this spec to some friends who are of a similar tech knoledge as myself, and they are telling me that a ATi 4850 card will be better than the GeForce 8800GT, and that i could do better with a AMD CPU, Phenom x4 maybe?, rather than the Intel one. If i did switch CPU then i'd also need to change the Motherboard of course, help there would be nice as well.

All these prices are from http://www.dabs.com a supplier i know and trust, and buy getting it all at the same place i save on delivery.

Lastly my budget is around this high £5xx price mark, and if possible a bit lower.

Thanks in advance for any help you guys can give, looking forward to hearing your views.

[Force Flow]

Stick with Intel...better bang per buck right now. You might want to drop down to an e8400 to safe a few dollars...there really isn't much difference between the two.

Yes, the 4850 will run circles around the 8800GT

Take a look at the Asus P5Q or Asus P5Q Pro for a motherboard.

Samsung drives are more failure prone than other brands. I'd suggest Seagate, or if need be, Western Digital.

[chuck4456]

Stay away from 680 chipsets.
You'll start gluing macaroni and beans on paper plates after you do a build with one of those.

[light875]

Oh, is the 650W PSU enough, overkill or not enough?

[Alaron]

That is a good choice. I'd stick with it.